


Spam mail

by dontpanic



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Fake (?) soulmates, M/M, Soulmates, crack!fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-26
Updated: 2014-03-26
Packaged: 2018-01-17 01:35:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1369096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dontpanic/pseuds/dontpanic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On his seventeenth birthday, Stiles receives an email containing the name of his soulmate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spam mail

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was created because even though I love reading stories with the soulmate trope (having each other's name appear on their body, having a mark, getting together in spite of the mark etc) the whole concept seems ludicrous to me, and this is what was created when I started over-analysing and generating ideas about the trope.  
> Not beta read, this was written in one night for fun.

There was a system that started in the 70’s and lasted for two and a half decades. Everyone - or at least, everyone with a mailbox in north America - got a letter around their seventeenth birthday, give or take a few days, unless of course the letter got lost. You know how the mail system is. This letter contained a name, and it spread that this was supposed to be the name of your soulmate, your one true love. Statistically, relationships worked out 32% of the time, but this was good enough. 

However, it was uncovered in the mid nineties that the whole thing was not the work of fate, or some sort of mysterious force. The Letters were, in fact, the work of a network of people who worked in public records. In their free time they matched up random people close in age who lived relatively close to each other (unless the person had moved without alerting the record holders, but at the time you really needed to have your details accurate in the phonebook). A series of coincidences led to the discovery. The whole system was shut down and the members of the network were sued for breach of privacy.

Stiles found it extremely ridiculous how nobody ever noticed all that mail being sent, hundreds of kids had their birthday on the same day, right? And imagine having to sent all that mail every single day. Huh, maybe that’s how it was discovered, wikipedia never talked about that part. He’d known vaguely about it, as he was born a year after that ended and his parents’ relationship had been a product of it, but he had never researched it until now, a few days before his seventeenth birthday. Well, he begun googling with “17th birthday rituals” and then progressed to “modern american 17th birthday rituals” after some disturbing results on the first round. He ended up here. He marveled at the idea that at the time of the soulmate system, there was no internet or virtual communities, and people had to read a phonebook in order to find out how to contact their alleged soulmate. If this happened now, they’d just friend each other on facebook. Hell, if the system was actually legit, there would be whole webpages and apps dedicated to helping people locate their soulmate. Maybe even government websites! (They would totally prefer it if the voters cared more about their love life than politics.) Too bad the closest thing is actually OkCupid…

Stiles closed the wikipedia tab. If he kept thinking about this concept, there’s no way he could stop. He went to the kitchen, fixed lunch and contemplated about the existence of magical benevolent love-dedicated mysterious forces while simultaneously trying to come up with a cool prank for Scott. How do you even prank a werewolf?  
.  
.  
.  
One week later - April 8th 2014

Stiles was on the phone with his grandma, who wanted to wish him happy birthday and ask him if he had seen the e-card she sent him. Wasn’t it lovely? She really liked the puppy on it. By the way, could he help her out with her facebook account? She accidentally added another 20 people she didn’t know, and she could never grasp how to delete them. Also she’d also started chatting on facebook with this nice lady who also liked iguanas, could we keep her? Have a wonderful day, darling, don’t forget to check your e-mail!

As far as Stiles knew, the only email address his grandma had was the gmail one, because it was the one who looked most mature and comprehensible. He’d checked it this morning, happy to see he had a few emails from relatives who wanted to wish him happy birthday but he was certain he had received no email from his grandma. Worried it might have ended up in the spam, which was so easy to overlook in google mail, he frantically started up his laptop to check. When google mail loaded, he did have a couple spam emails, but neither was from his gran. The oldest one was the typical “enlarge your penis” that he got every now and then, but the other one had arrived just last week and contained just a name in it: Derek Hale.

At first Stiles thought maybe it was just Derek sending out the new email address he’d created at the BH Library, but he was pretty sure that he hadn’t given Derek his gmail. Also, this email address was way too weird to be Derek: “yourfatedconnection” was more like a chat up line someone had tried to use on him once. Stiles cringed at the memory. This didn’t make sense at all. Maybe it was that guy, and he somehow found his email and decided to blackmail him into going out with him by threatening to reveal to his dad who his son was in love with?

Stiles looked at it again. Mail with just a name on it… Could it be? He /had/ just turned seventeen. Was his soulmate really Derek Hale? That would be kind of awesome, and kind of weird. More awesome, though. Maybe it was really fate, giving him a push in the right direction.

But then Stiles remember how, after he’d played his prank on Scott and then helped him make his house smell right again, he had told him about the soulmate system and they both laughed at the idea of creepy old men matching up teenagers. And Scott, of course, knew about Stiles’ feelings for Derek and always encouraged him to act on them. The email had arrived that day, April 1st. A well-intended prank was such a Scott thing to do… 

Stiles smiled, shook his head. Then he emptied his spam folder, got up and got ready for his birthday party with all his amazing friends.

Far, far away, the magical benevolent love-dedicated mysterious force sighed, and recalled the good old days when her human servants had been sufficient, even if they often messed up names and addresses. Nobody believed in soulmates anymore. There was nothing more she could do.


End file.
